Don't Be a Sucker
Book Review: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable", Penguin Books, 2010. The MIRI and LessWrong founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, once wrote : "There is a meme which says that a certain ritual of cognition is the paragon of reasonableness and so defines what the reasonable people do. But alas, the reasonable people often get their butts handed to them by the unreasonable ones, because the universe isn't always reasonable . [...] If you keep on losing, perhaps you are doing something wrong . Do not console yourself about how you were so wonderfully rational in the course of losing. That is not how things are supposed to go. It is not the Art that fails, but you who fails to grasp the Art." At the very least, a rationalist should avoid shooting their own foot off. As a corollary, they should avoid being a sucker -- which is certainly what the philosopher/statistician/trader/essayist Prof. Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say